You don’t need to read this report to know that this country has a problem. Just walk through any airport and observe the throngs barely able to move or breathe or sit in a regular chair. I’m a libertarian kind of fellow, so I see no need to get harrumphy about this. The experience of obesity cannot be in any way pleasant for the person involved – physically, psychologically, emotionally. It must be a prison for many, a prison that in many cases should prompt sympathy and support; and the huge profits to be made from diet pills, diet fads and exercize programs reveal the extent of the phenomenon. What’s to be done on a collective basis? I have an idea: nothing. If people want to eat themselves into misery and early death, it really isn’t anyone else’s business. If businesses want to cater to getting people fat and then helping them get thin, and no one is committing outright fraud, what’s the problem? It’s a free-ish country, and the gluttony and vanity industries are part of what keeps this economy going. I fear, however, that Big Food is soon going to be getting the same treatment as other perfectly legitimate industries, such as Big Tobacco and Big Alcohol. McDonald’s has already removed their Super Size options. Who’s next? Ben and Jerry’s? Friendlys? The usual scolds are already prepping their jeremiads:
“If the government said, ‘You really ought to cut back on soft drinks and juice drinks,’ those lobbyists would go berserk. They don’t want to take on the food industry,” said Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition and public health at New York University.
Of course, I would take this view because I’m libertarian on these kinds of issues. But I am a little perplexed by the silence of the religious right. I mean, isn’t gluttony a deadly sin? Shouldn’t fat people be shamed, denounced, or loved and saved? This affects far, far more people than, er, well, you know where I’m going here. How many sermons have you heard inveighing against extra fries? Just asking.
COULD MOORE RUN? Tim Noah tries to encourage the Ralph Nader of the religious right.
SANITY ON THE RIGHT: If you need to be reminded of how low much of American conservatism has now stooped in its vulgar embrace of anything that suits its culture-war purposes, then read William F. Buckley on Mel Gibson’s idiosyncratic splatter-fest.
The Dish 